Civil Engineering Professor Panos D. Prevedouros, PhD discusses his opinions on infrastructure issues with emphasis on the City and County of Honolulu.

Monday, April 30, 2012

Hawaiian Island Sustainability

How can we tell if an island is sustainable or not? All islands are
net importers, meaning residents depend on external resources to
survive, so they tend to be less sustainable compared to a
self-sufficient continent.
To get a handle on island sustainability, a UH study group developed a
database of 52 islands with populations in excess of 50,000.

With a sustainability score of 300 being “very good” and a score of 30
being “very bad,” Oahu scores 140 and Maui scores 180. The Big Island
scores 170 and can improve to 200 with all-geothermal power. Overall,
Hawaii’s population-adjusted score is exactly average at 150, so its
sustainability profile has a lot of room for improvement.

Brief Information about Panos

Panos D. Prevedouros, Ph.D. is a professor of traffic and transportation engineering at the Department of Civil Engineering, Univ. of Hawaii-Manoa since 1990.
Panos graduated from the Aristotle Univ. of Greece in 1984, and with Masters and PhD degrees in 1990 from Northwestern Univ. (Evanston, IL), a leading academic institution in engineering and transportation.
He chairs the Freeway Simulation Subcommittee of the Transportation Research Board. He was president of the Hawaii Highway Users Alliance from 2006 to 2008.
Panos co-authored a Transportation Engineering textbook and over 100 reports and technical papers. He received the 2005 Van Wagoner Award of the Institute of Transportation Engineers.
He co-organized the 1st International Symposium on Freeway Operations (ISFO) in Athens, Greece, and the 2nd ISFO in Honolulu in June 2009.
Dr. Prevedouros served in the Transit Advisory Task Force in 2006 and in the Technology Selection Expert Panel in 2008 of the City Council of Honolulu.
He run for mayor of Honolulu in the 2008 elections and finished 3rd in the primary elections with 18% of the vote from a field of nine candidates.